All posts tagged ‘drawing’

Kids seem to have an endless supply of creativity. Drawing, painting, writing, building, coloring, storytelling – anything can spark it off and it can lead to hours of fun. And stacks and stacks of art of all forms decorating your house.

We currently have an entire sofa dedicated to displaying a permanent exhibition of crazy Lego buildings and vehicles – which we can “never take apart again, because I want to keep them forever.” Several walls, both in her bedroom and ours, plastered with paintings and drawings, and sketch pads full of many more. There are cardboard box models on top of wardrobes and shelves and boxes full of homemade birthday, Christmas and Easter cards – complete with enough “I love you” messages to melt to stoniest of hearts.

What could be more fitting for a post here on GeekDad than the tale of a father and his son (and daughter too) teaming up to make their own iPad app? We’ve mentioned at least one here before, then there was 5-year-old Cassie’s “Magical Ponycorn Adventure” which took the internet by storm earlier in the year and I’m sure there are many more out there.

My skills do not lean in the direction of drawing, and never have. I’ve taken a course here and there, trying my best to improve my sketches, but I’m honest enough with myself to admit I’ll never be producing the kind of art found in How to Draw Steampunk from Walter Foster. Written by Joey Marsocci and Allison DeBlasio and illustrated by Bob Berry, this is one of those books that is thoroughly enjoyable to thumb through and drool over (for folks like me) and even better for those with artistic talents who want to obtain some tips on adding steampunk elements to their art or just plain learn how to start from scratch and create some eye-catching steampunk artwork.

It’s a full-color book, 128 pages, and oversized to allow for some great tutorials on a variety of techniques from pencil to paint to digital image manipulation. The first chapter of the book is perfect for me — a brief couple of essays on steampunk and the influences around us that make for good imagery, and then a solid overview of color techniques, supplies, texture design, and perspective, my real weak spot. There are color pencil techniques followed by brief paint pattern explanations and a simplified overview of Photoshop.

I-Wei Huang, the lead character artist for the new game Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventures has put together a cool speed drawing video of all the Skylanders. Thirty-two characters across eight elements are presented in under five minutes. My son and I had fun watching the video and guessing each character as they were drawn. After checking out the video head over to I-Wei’s blog, for some cool coloring pages of all the characters.

It is out of print, but over at Boing Boing they have a great little write up on The Official Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Coloring Album. This is exactly the kind of product that deserves to be re-released as a PDF download so that our geeklets can spend hours becoming aquatinted with important aspects of art and color like the finer details of orcish skin, the shading details on chain mail and just how bad a gold dragon looks if you only have yellow to work with.

However, you won’t find it in DriveRPG. Instead it is available via Amazon for just about exactly a cool grand. (As of this writing there was also a copy available for $80, including shipping, but it’s already colored in.)

Unless some anti-Hoarder purge destroyed your personal archive, there is a good chance that a stack of high-concept, low-quality artwork can be found in your home. It is the byproduct of countless hours as a kid turning blank sheets of paper into imagined creatures, vehicles, and landscapes. Somewhere between ages 6 and 21, however, most of us lose this desire to draw. Our creative outlets turn to photos and word processors, leaving the pencils and crayons in some forgotten drawer.

A new project launched this year celebrates the ability of kids to come up with amazing ideas. Using kid art as inspiration, Imaginawesome re-imagines those drawings to bring them a little bit closer to reality.

The Fort (artwork by Archie Makice & Garrett Miller)

The project is the brainchild of Garrett Miller (@heyitsgarrett), a Washington, D.C. software engineer. Miller is not a professional artist by trade, although he is one by training. He graduated from Oberlin College in 2006 as a studio art major before wending his way into a programming job further east. “I miss drawing,” Miller admits, consoling himself with an endless series of doodles at work.

Unless some anti-Hoarder purge destroyed your personal archive, there is a good chance that a stack of high-concept, low-quality artwork can be found in your home. It is the byproduct of countless hours as a kid turning blank sheets of paper into imagined creatures, vehicles, and landscapes. Somewhere between ages 6 and 21, however, most of us lose this desire to draw. Our creative outlets turn to photos and word processors, leaving the pencils and crayons in some forgotten drawer.

A new project launched this year celebrates the ability of kids to come up with amazing ideas. Using kid art as inspiration, Imaginawesome re-imagines those drawings to bring them a little bit closer to reality.

The Fort (artwork by Archie Makice & Garrett Miller)

The project is the brainchild of Garrett Miller (@heyitsgarrett), a Washington, D.C. software engineer. Miller is not a professional artist by trade, although he is one by training. He graduated from Oberlin College in 2006 as a studio art major before wending his way into a programming job further east. “I miss drawing,” Miller admits, consoling himself with an endless series of doodles at work.

Artist Mike Bukowski loves H.P. Lovecraft, it appears. His website has tentacles on it. He’s had a number of art shows focused on the slippery, squamous creatures of the Cthulhu mythos. And so, last June, he began the arduous process of illustrating each and every monstrous denizen of Howard Phillips’ horror stories.

Says Bukowski:

“Since I discovered his work in highschool, I’ve been in love with H.P. Lovecraft’s writing. It’s influenced me artistically more than any other author. His cosmic nihilism and fear of all things related with the sea churn up horrid images in any reader and are almost impossible to dislodge from an artists head.”

So far, he’s done a bang-up job, which is no small task. In some cases, Lovecraft described his critters like a scientist documenting a new species. Other times, he just gives them a name. Bukowski is drawing them all.

Fair warning: while some of the pieces (the succubus and the satyr, specifically) contain nudity, most of these are safe for older kids.

Remember that game we played as kids that we called “Telephone?” You sit in a circle and whisper things around the circle. By the time your phrase gets back to you, it has changed so much that it’s nothing like the original. Everyone giggles and laughs. At least that’s how it usually worked.

New in the line of Cranium games is Scribblish, put out by Hasbro. It is similar to that childhood game of Telephone, except that instead of whispering a phrase around in a circle, you write captions and draw pictures. Between four and six people can play, but we discovered that the more people you have, the better. I wouldn’t suggest playing with fewer than four people, unless you have particularly unpredictable or oblivious people. Then it might work.

To play, everyone starts with a sheet of paper and a paper scroll. You each take a card, pick a caption and write it in the first caption spot. Then draw a picture to go with the caption. Slide the paper up into the scroll and someone rolls the die. Pass the scrolls around as the die dictates (to the left, to the right, etc.), and unroll the scroll just until you see the picture. Then write a caption for it. Hide the caption and roll the die again, passing the scrolls around. Draw the picture for the caption you get. You keep this up, alternating captions and drawings, until the paper is full. This takes about a half hour or so, depending on everyone’s drawing speed.

Drawing and Watercolor books by Klutz have fun and useful lessons for all ages. Photo: Kathy Ceceri

I’m pretty good at drawing. So are my kids. But in my career as a homeschool teacher I’ve found that the things that come easiest to me are the hardest for me to teach. When things are second nature I don’t know how to explain what I do. So when I wanted my kids to learn how to draw things that look three dimensional, or make cityscapes which seem to recede into the distance, I needed some help. There are lots of tricks artists know, and they’re not hard to learn. You just need the right instructor.

While not cartooning books per se, both are filled with fun, light illustrations to show you what effect they’re explaining and get you started. And although these books leave plenty of room for artistic imagination, for me their real value is the way they introduce the ideas of perspective, line quality, and other helpful tools for beginning artists.

Blake, who did Drawing, has illustrated many of Roald Dahl’s weird novels, including Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and The Fantastic Mr. Fox. Drawing offers “art school” exercises in blind drawing, and lessons in shading, creating movement, and the proportions of the human face.

Hurd (son of Clement G. Hurd of Goodnight Moon fame) is the creator of one of our all-time favorite children’s books, the song-based Mama Don’t Allow, among others. He gives readers tips on “discovered art” (incorporating smudges and mistakes), not overworking the paint to keep the colors vibrant and unmuddied, mixing colors, mixed media, washes, and other handy basics.

Photo: Kathy Ceceri

For kids who haven’t yet been taught the basics of drawing and painting (including homeschoolers and students whose schools have cut back on art in the curriculum), these books make a great first step. But really, they are good enough to use at any age. I bought an extra copy of Watercolor For the Artistically Undiscovered for myself, to help me learn to use a medium I’ve only dabbled with.